John Sayles' "Amigo"

It has been called "The Forgotten War", but it's not forgotten by writer and director John Sayles, who is on the show to talk about his newest film about the Philippine-American war, "Amigo".

Mark Twain said, "There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it -- perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands -- but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector -- not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial.

It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now -- why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation."

Sayles will introduce his film at Cinestudio (Trinity College campus) in Hartford on Wednesday night (October 26, 2011). He will begin his lecture at 5:30 and the movie airs at 7:30.